In recent weeks the White House has been pushing a new argument about the economy: “We didn’t know how bad it was.”

President Obama used this line Tuesday in an interview with KIRO in Seattle, saying that he wished he understood just how deep the economic problems were when he took office. Obama said: “I think we understood that it was bad but we didn’t know how bad it was.” He added: “I think I could have prepared the American people for how bad this was going to be had we had a sense of that.”

So was Barack Obama surprised by the seriousness of the economic problems in 2008, as he now claims?